


leave what's heavy (what's heavy behind)

by liraels



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Daemon Touching, F/M, His Dark Materials AU, M/M, it figuratively writes itself it really does
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22357957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liraels/pseuds/liraels
Summary: If Rey's daemon never flies, she's alright with that. If Finn's daemon stops speaking, he'll still talk to her. If Ben’s daemon never settles, he'll love her regardless.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

Ben is fourteen and his daemon hasn't settled.

His mother isn't worried. She tells him about her childhood friend, one Amilyn Holdo, whose daemon didn't settle into a reindeer until she was fifteen. Leia pulls him to her chest, and her scarab-daemon nuzzles up to Castessa, and it's okay. He’s not strange, he's not wrong, he's not different. He is his mother's boy.

Ben is seventeen and his daemon hasn't settled.

His father is worried, but he doesn't tell Ben. Which is fine, because Ben hasn't seen him in a year and hasn't spoken to him in a month. If his father is worried, he's keeping it close to his chest and letting it force them apart. Ben wants nothing to do with those worries anymore.

Ben excels under Luke's training. Always the best student, the cleverest, the most resourceful. In his spare time, of which there is little, he commandeers one of the B-wings they train with and takes it out into the wilderness. At top speed, he zips along in the blink of an eye, and Castessa curls in his lap and changes from lizard to terrier to butterfly. He’s a natural with a blaster, too, at first even better than he is with a lightsaber.

He wishes he could tell Han about it, but it’s his father's turn to reach out. Ben’s never been good at words and he’s tired of being the first one to speak them. He suspects the voice in his head that tells him _you’ll_ _do better alone_ has a point. He is his father's son.

Ben is twenty and his daemon hasn't settled.

Ben isn't worried anymore. All of the other students' daemons settled years ago, and they’ve slipped into habitual rhythms. They get used to their daemon's shape and know how to make best use of it in training. Ben presses his advantages—Castessa shocks their opponent by changing from a fly under their feet to a great bear in their face, she dives and pecks with a vulture beak and then with eagle talons an instant later.

Luke isn't happy about it. “She'll settle one day,” he says. “Your reliance on her shape-changes will become a weakness.”

Ben isn't so sure. He's never heard of anyone whose daemon hasn't settled before the age of eighteen. Castessa thinks she'll never settle, tells him about the pinprick in her heart, the tiniest speck that's missing. There's nothing wrong with her, Ben stresses. It's just that they were born incomplete. Everyone is born so, and most of them never find that missing thing, so it shouldn’t matter that Castessa's hollowness has a physical manifestation.

This is life, for them. A voice inside his head says, _You are your grandfather's man._

~

Kelja's been Rey’s only companion for as long as either of them can remember. Rey knows there was life before she was five years old, but she doesn't like to think about it. She doesn’t talk to her daemon about her parents except to remind him that they're coming back. One day. She need only be patient, and good, and ready.

Kelja settles earlier than most daemons. Rey doesn't realise this at the time—there are few children resident to Niima Outpost and its desolate surrounds, and there’s never anyone to tell her how these things work. How she works, how her body works, how her soul is supposed to work.

So, when Kelja assumes the shape of a ferruginous hawk one morning, when Rey is barely nine, she thinks nothing of it. She laments the loss of his familiar furry guises, but otherwise accepts the change with finality. She strokes his golden feathers, marvels at his lengthy wingspan, and makes dinners of the rodents he kills with his strong beak.

She loves Kelja, and he loves her. Who else is there to love, here in this wasteland?

There’s something else, though. It's not a problem, Rey tells him. It's perfectly fine, Kelja tells her. It's that Kelja doesn't fly.

He _can_ fly, Rey knows. Short hops and fleeting fancies in the air—but never too far, and never too high. Rey sees other daemons straying from their people, up to a dozen feet or more. But the instant Kelja hops off her shoulder she feels a twinge. A mere metre's distance between them is utterly unbearable.

So, he could fly, but he doesn't. It would hurt too much.

It might be seen as a disadvantage for a scavenger to have a bird daemon who doesn't fly, who can't move more than a few feet away without it feeling like Rey's heart is tearing itself from her veins. She makes do. Kelja hooks his claws into the back of Rey's tunic and flaps his great wings to help her balance as she leaps around the wrecks of old starships—those wings are strong, despite their lack of use. He can execute a perfect swoop, and does so most mornings as they watch the sun rise: from his usual perch on Rey's shoulders he glides up and around and down again in a tight circle above her head, just to prove he can, just to make Rey smile, and it’s only slightly painful.

The real problem is that people notice. It wasn't an issue when she was little; young daemons tend to stick to the warm safety of a deep pocket or the hollow of a neck, especially when their person is a lonely child like Rey was. Now, it is a problem. Now, people see a woman with a hawk daemon who never stretches his wings, a scavenger who never utilises the advantages of flight. People make judgements.

There's another problem in them too, in Rey, and in Kelja especially. It's related to the flight problem but not entirely the cause of it—it's unique and odd, and sometimes it's awful and Rey cries at night for the feel of it, tears soaking into Kelja's smooth feathers. It's like her daemon's missing something, some vital piece. Like there's a hollow pinprick at his very centre.

Rey tells herself it's alright. She has Kelja, and always will, and they're waiting. They need only wait, need only go through the motions of a life here on Jakku—wake, eat, work, eat, sleep, repeat, repeat, repeat—and they will be rewarded. They will be freed. They will go home.

They’ll fly far, far away one day. All they need to do is wait.

~

It's Japhanax who tells Finn not to shoot.

He wants to snap back, _I wasn't going to, I don't want to shoot, I would never kill for them_. He doesn't, because he's not at all sure that's true.

It's a surprise she still talks to him at all, really, what with the pacification program they put the new Troopers through. From the settling, that's when it starts. They trap your daemon, subdue them, treat them, turn them into a shell. They still move and fight but, over time, they stop speaking, stop thinking, and turn into little more than pets. Finn hugs Japhanax close each night since she settled, talks to her in every spare moment, and she's doing well. She goes mute some days, for hours on end, and it _terrifies_ him. But she always wakes him the next morning with a sharp quip and relief washes over Finn with the force of a gale.

There are daemon programs in place before the settling, too: meditation exercises, rigorous training, experiments. These measures are aimed at influencing the way a daemon settles, the shape it takes. They like dogs: obedient, ordinary, and perfect for combat. Wolves and bears are also preferred, along with birds of prey for the TIE pilots.

Japhanax is a meerkat.

It was disappointing, at first. Until Finn grew to love her in this shape, her lithe body, delicate paws, her fur which zigzags in tan-and-black patterns. Finn bears the taunts and insults the officers throw at him, a Stormtrooper with a rodent for a daemon. He thinks she's beautiful, would never trade her for a rottweiler or a grizzly. She thinks he's beautiful, too, and perhaps that's why she urges him to still his finger on the trigger.

Later, he’ll thank her. He'll contemplate his miserable future as a third-rate Trooper who couldn't even fire on an unarmed target, but he'll still thank her. He'll ask why she said it, what made her tell him not to shoot. She won't be able to explain—just that it felt right. It felt like that was what she was alive for.

~

Hux hits his daemon.

Hux hits his daemon, like most of the First Order officers hit their daemons, and Ben hates it. Castessa hates it too, but not like Ben does—Ben can't help but flinch every time he hears a kick or a slap and accompanying squeal.

He wears the mask for many reasons, and that instinctual flinch is one of them. Another reason is his own daemon, and the fact that he loves her. He loves his daemon, and she loves him, and he smiles at her when she brushes by and it's difficult to repress.

Daemons are not valued in the First Order, not apart from their utility. They are useful in their own ways: wolf and dog demons to bark, bird daemons to fly, snake daemons to slither and bite. But nothing more. Talking to one's daemon is heavily discouraged, it would be like speaking to your cutlery. Stupid, embarrassing, and pointless to attempt communication with something that is just a tool. A some _thing_.

But, Ben loves his daemon. It's hard to stop, and harder to hide, especially from Snoke. Snoke says his close relationship with his daemon is a good thing, that almost all of the Sith had strong daemons who were loyal to their masters. Ben doesn't know about ‘loyal', but he and Castessa are certainly close. She’s the only one who really talks to him, and if she ever stopped…he thinks that would be it for him. It would all be over.

Hux hits his daemon and it echoes through the corridors, a resounding slap followed by a muffled cry. Ben bites his lip so hard it bleeds and he buries his hand in Castessa's soft fur. Her panther form is comforting, heavy-set and muscular but always sleek and warm. It was Ben who chose it.

She still hadn't settled when he joined the First Order under Snoke, so he chose a form for her to permanently assume, at least when in public. She couldn't decide, so fond as she was of the dragonfly and the jackrabbit and the Komodo dragon and, more recently, the albatross. Ben picked a panther. Big cats aren’t uncommon among the First Order. They’re not as prized as wolves and dogs, but they’re deemed acceptable. Black, too, felt appropriate. Castessa agreed, and so here they are now. Kylo Ren and his nameless panther-daemon.

Ben Solo and Castessa, who’s still not settled. Who scuttles under Ben’s collar as a beetle when he shuts himself in his quarters. Who perches as an albatross on his shoulders when he's otherwise alone. She doesn't want to be a panther forever, and neither does Ben, but they each sometimes wonder whether she'll ever settle. Whether he'll ever be still.

~

Kelja and Rey learn to fly in tiny steps.

It happens for the first time in the Falcon, and Rey doesn't even notice, preoccupied as she is with the threat to her and Finn's lives in the form of a contingent of TIE fighters. Kelja’s been hopping and flapping and nipping at Rey's ear since they lifted off, but as Rey cuts the engines and the ship falls spiralling to the ground—he flies. He swoops in a wide circle around the cabin, stretches his wings and steers his glide out into the ship proper. BB-8 beeps an alarmed beep when he clips him with his talons.

Finn shoots and the last TIE crashes and Rey fires up the engines and accelerates into the sky. By the time she looks around to smile at her daemon, Kelja has ended her flight and is again perched stoically on the back of the pilot's seat. Rey hasn’t noticed Kelja taking wing, not by sight. She felt the swooping in her belly and the bubbling in her chest and mistook it for adrenaline instead of happiness, fear instead of flight.

~

Japhanax brings it up first. She’s always been the braver one, the most direct, out of her and Finn. Finn’s supposed to be packing up explosives but instead he’s casting looks at Poe jogging away to his X-wing and wondering if he’ll see him tomorrow. Japhanax is curled up inside his jacket, and she nudges Finn with a paw and says, “You and the pilot, am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?”

Finn blushes. Only Japhanax can ever make him blush. “Maybe,” he tells her, murmuring into the collar of his jacket. Poe's jacket. “Don’t know if I'm ready for any of that. Yet. I guess we'll see.”

“That we will,” Japhanax says, and Finn can feel her smile.

“Hey, don't think I haven’t noticed you and his daemon. That orange-and-blue bird, and he's got that obnoxious crest to boot. You're mesmerised by pretty colours, Japhanax.”

“Pretty colours, pretty boys. It's all the same to me.”

~

The pain of looking his father in the eye is almost unbearable, mirrored as it is by the pain of Castessa’s claws in his neck and shoulder. It’s _almost_ unbearable – what’s truly unbearable is this other pain that he feels radiating from his daemon, through his daemon, a pain that is not his and not hers but belongs to _someone else_. He’s newly complete and it hurts more than anything. Castessa can’t take it; she curls into Ben’s neck as an albatross and digs her talons deep into his skin.

He should be worried about who might be seeing her out of her panther form, who now knows that Kylo Ren’s daemon never settled—but that only matters if he lives through this. If he can do this one thing and get to the other side of it.

Blood drips between his shoulder blades. He clenches his teeth and he does it. Han Solo is skewered right through the ribs, but the more violent sight is that of his ocelot-daemon winking out like a light.

Castessa beats her great albatross-wings and screeches like a banshee, flapping frantically, scratching Ben with her talons as she careens around his head. She _loses it_ , cycling through shapes like a newborn baby, like a mad thing. She drops like a stone to the bridge as an echidna, scurries along as a ferret, slithers up Ben’s leg as a deep green python, pecks at his throat as a toucan.

Ben shoos her away, shouts at her to get a hold of herself, settle down, be still. But she doesn’t, she won’t, and he nearly hits her. He clenches his lightsaber with a white fist, he draws it back and envisions bringing it down on her shifting hide – feathers, leather, fur, scales, skin. Imagines the crack and her scream.

He nearly hits her.

Then – pain, exploding in his abdomen. He’s been hit – Chewie with his bowcaster, and Ben forgets all about his anger, his hatred; now there’s only pain. Castessa’s a panther again, and she lets him lean on her as he stumbles out of the base. He buries his hands in her fur and feels her heartbeat in his palms.

He nearly hit her. He very nearly did.

~

The next time Kelja flies, Rey sees it all. She opens her eyes to a face full of snow and a chill that penetrates her skull, and everything hurts. Everything hurts except for that one thing—the missing thing, the absence Kelja always felt more keenly than her. It's full, now, but it's full of fear and rage and terrible guilt. It's full of _someone else_. Something has awakened but it's wrong, it's so wrong.

Rey stands. Kelja clutches onto her belt and says, “You can do it, we’ll be alright, you have to do it.” They've always lived with that hurt, that hollow, she and her daemon. They can live with it again.

She reaches for the lightsaber, _please, please_ , and it comes to her. It chooses her, and Kelja screeches and rises through the trees like he's the very breath of the wind. And it doesn't hurt. Kelja pulls away from Rey, farther than ever before, and it should be agony but it isn't. Somehow, it isn't.

Kelja soars and soars and swoops, circling Rey and Kylo as they clash. He drops to claw at the face of his daemon, that great black panther, and Kylo yells out and falls back, reaching for her, whimpering _Castessa_ , _Castessa_. Rey brings the saber down and it tears him apart, an ugly burn bisecting his face.

The earth splits, too, and that hurt, that hollow, is back. Larger than before, deeper than before, and it's filling with pain this time, pain so acute that Rey wants to cry so hard and long that her tears melt the snow. She doesn't. She blocks it out. She goes to Finn, and Kelja shelters Japhanax beneath a wing, and _oh_ what it is to have someone who isn't her own daemon. Someone who isn't herself. She cannot lose him. She will not.

Kelja spreads his wings and takes to the air. He spots Chewie and the Falcon just through the trees, and they're saved. The hollow is forgotten, the pain is ignored. They’re okay, they won, he can fly, it doesn't hurt and _they can fly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone interested, here’s what I have in mind for the daemons. Rey has a ferruginous hawk (see https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ferruginous_Hawk/overview), Finn has a meerkat, Ben has a black panther (which is really just a jaguar with black colouring), and Poe has a particular species of kingfisher (see https://www.redmillhouse.com.au/birdwatching/daintree-bird-species/buff-breasted-paradise-kingfisher). 
> 
> There’ll be three chapters to this, corresponding roughly to the three episodes in the trilogy. The plot might get a little AU, though, at some point.


	2. Chapter 2

They test their limits. Rey stands on a high peak and looks out across the ocean, something within her aches to leap. Kelja launches himself from her shoulder. The distance starts to hurt at around twenty feet, and at thirty it's sheer agony.

But it's so much more than they've ever had.

Luke Skywalker is nothing like the myths and stories. Rey certainly isn't impressed with him, but Kelja's just about ready to peck his daemon's eyes out. He’s been swooping around Luke's bright green frog-daemon all morning, cawing harshly—Rey has told him off more than once. He expresses all the frustration Rey keeps packed neatly between her ribs.

There's another reason Kelja's frustrated. A thing was found, so its loss now feels a thousand times more palpable, more gaping. A few times, Rey catches Kelja gazing off along the waves to the distant horizon. He gets an odd look in his eyes and goes very still. Rey reaches out to him for comfort but only finds more emptiness – it’s like the panel of a ship giving way beneath her feet, on a platform she’d always throught to be sturdy.

Rey doesn't ask. She doesn't want to know. He can fly now, they can be apart, they can be normal, and isn't that enough for him? It should be enough.

~

Finn is fairly sure he's dreaming. But, then again, self-awareness usually jolts him awake immediately, and he's still here. Dream or no, this probably isn’t reality.

There's a fog, and it's also pain. There are flashes in it, forking through cloud like lightning in shades of angry red and electric blue. _Rey_. Of course, that's why he's here—he needs to find Rey... He looks over to Japhanax to ask firstly if she might know where Rey is—is that her over there in the fog?—and secondly if she thinks they're dreaming.

Japhanax isn't there.

Finn jolts into consciousness with all the force of a blaster-bolt. His limbs flail wildly, reaching for Japhanax – where is she? _Rey. Japhanax. Rey._

The world spins and a flat surface rushes up to meet him. He lies there for a second, rests his cheek against the cold floor that’s humming with the distant rumble of a ship’s engine. A soft weight falls onto his back and Finn chokes out a breath. _Japhanax is here, she's fine_ ; she nuzzles into his neck.

He is, or was, in some kind of treatment bed, and is still clothed an odd suit which is spurts liquid—is he still dreaming? He sits up, slowly, and then it strikes him— _where's Rey?_ And then— _is Rey alive?_

He abandons caution, leaping to his feet as quickly as his aching muscles will allow. He frantically disconnects his suit from the various appendages that feed into it, asking Japhanax, “Do you remember seeing her? Before we passed out, what happened?”

He’s at the door before he realises that Japhanax hasn’t replied. “Japhanax? Did you _see_ her?”

Finn reaches down so she can climb up his arm and nestle in that spot she likes between his neck and shoulder. “Japhanax, is today a silent day?”

She blinks at him. Finn closes his eyes. _Of all days…_ But he pushes down the bile in his throat, strokes her head lightly with a finger, and sets out the door. She’ll be fine, they’ll be fine, he just needs to get on with it, get on with finding Rey.

The corridor outside is hectic, and he can hardly hear his own thoughts – much less Japhanax, if she spoke at all – over the din. There are no familiar faces.

Until – Poe. Poe is suddenly there, one hand on his shoulder and another on his diaphragm, and Finn closes his eyes again. He feels the flapping of wings on his chest as Poe’s daemon tries to talk to Japhanax, but of course Japhanax merely looks at Linus and says nothing. Nothing at all.

“Finn, Finn, is Japhanax okay?” Poe asks, and his voice seems to swim to the surface of the murky pool that is Finn’s world.

Finn doesn't know how to answer. He shrugs, as well as he can in the medical suit. “It's just one of those days.” He hopes.

Poe frowns but nods and pulls him to his feet. He fills Finn in on the state of the Resistance, of Starkiller Base, and of Rey. “You'll be okay?” Poe asks once they've reached the medical bay. “Japhanax...”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Poe looks like he's about to jog off before he pauses, giving Finn a look he can't decipher. He cups his hand and brings it up to Finn's face— _what is he doing_ —but then the hand falls to where Japhanax is curled against Finn's neck. Poe’s hand hovers slowly, tenderly, across Japhanax’s fur – not touching, though Finn draws in a sharp breath when for a moment he thinks he might be. There’s a half-inch of air between Japhanax and Poe’s skin.

Poe seems to shake himself out of a trance. “I'll see you round,” he says, hooking the offending hand into his beltloops. “Take care.” His face is set, his eyes fierce again.

Finn nods, and lets him go.

~

Hux, of course, thinks it’s funny.

He settles into his new place, behind and to the right of the Supreme Leader—who, as Ben occasionally has to remind himself, is _him_ now.

Hux does this often, shadows him, unsettling him. He is a master of the disconcerting aura. Usually, Ben can ignore him. It's a test of wills—who breaks first, who speaks first. Today, the silence and stillness in Hux's presence is rough and grating.

“Anything to report, General Hux?” he forces out between his teeth. His mask takes the unsteady waver of his voice and turns it into a deep crackle.

There is a stuffy pause. Ben doesn't even need to look, he can feel Hux's smirk taint the air. “Nothing, sir.”

Castessa sits at Ben's feet in her panther form. There’s no containing the gossip now—every Trooper and their daemon knows that Kylo Ren’s daemon has no settled shape. But Ben clings to consistency when there is naught else to cling to, so the panther it is.

“Don't you have anything to attend to?”

Hux straightens, preening. “Not at the moment, sir. I am, as always, at the Supreme Leader's beck and call.”

Hux's daemon, some kind of weasel whose name even Hux has likely forgotten, takes a playful pounce at Castessa. Castessa unfortunately reacts, leaping to the side and shrinking to the shape of a moth. Hux's weasel-daemon watches her flit out of his reach and onto Ben's shoulder, and Ben doesn't like the bright look in the daemon's eyes.

“In that case,” Ben says, “you can make yourself useful. I want a report on the status of every ship in the fleet. Coordinates, fuel levels, command capability.”

Hux doesn't even protest, which is a bad sign. “Of course, sir. Only I thought...”

“Out with it.”

“Only, sir, we have extensive programs here in the First Order, I'm sure you know, to control daemon development. Major Tennyson would welcome your... _participation_ in his training—” Hux is interrupted by a squeal from his daemon, currently under Castessa's paw. She changes in a flurry, from panther to lion to polar bear, her snarl changing timbre as she transforms.

“Castessa,” Ben says, and she lets the daemon go. He hears Hux swallow, and then watches him turn and stalk quickly away.

That felt...good. Too good, and it’s likely to provoke dissent rather than pacify it. At least Castessa is pretending to enjoy herself.

~

Rey opens her eyes to warm morning sun. Kelja stretches his wings and preens his feathers, settling them into a smooth coat that reflects the golden light. It's the first time Rey's had time to breathe since—since that last morning on Jakku, probably, and for a moment she allows herself to simply sit, to feel the island and its sun and its air.

And suddenly there's the devil.

She shoots him, of course, looming there with the eyes and the cloak and the angry scar of something that can only be monstrous and evil. _Surely_. He jolts, not hit, and the panther-daemon at his side erupts into the air as a vulture, flapping madly. A moment later, she settles on Ben’s shoulder as a small hare.

Rey can’t help but gape. “Your daemon—”

“I know,” Ben says, surprisingly low and soft. “Obviously.”

“But how—why...?” She forgets herself briefly, unable to tear her eyes from the hare-daemon that seconds ago had feathers.

He takes a minute to answer, raises his hand to his shoulder so that his daemon can hop onto his knuckles as a sparrow. “Always,” he says. “We’ve always been this way.”

And suddenly Rey understands – it makes _sense_ , this fullness and the wrongness of it. The tilting, lurching plane of the Force whenever she and Ben meet. She remembers where she is, who she is, and who she is _his enemy_ so she grits her teeth and pushes against him. He’s unstable, his daemon’s unsettled. Surely just one strong Force-shove will send him away.

“You’re not doing this,” he mutters, as if observing some academic phenomenon. “Can you see my surroundings? I can’t see yours.”

“You’re going to pay for what you did,” Rey spits. She pushes harder, trying desperately to tap into that feeling that consumed her in the forest – it’s in her, she knows it is. But as hard as she tries, he still stands before her. Unmoved.

“Just you,” he says, and the two words seem to ripple through the air and still Rey’s heart. It’s – too close, too much, especially for _him_ , and for a moment Rey is blinded with rage. Kelja’s claws prick her skin, clutching her shoulder tight, and the anger builds and he _dives_ at Ben. His sharp beak and long talons are razor-weapons, but Ben ducks and weaves with a kind of grace that sits at odds with the image Rey holds of him in her mind—that monster from the forest, hulking and stumbling, just pure weight and power and rage.

Kelja turns the dive into a glide, arcing around the stone huts and out over the sea. He’s rapidly stretching the new limits of their bond, and Rey forgets the rage and instinctively presses a hand to her chest, bracing for the ache, but—there's no pain. Kelja swoops back and lands on her outstretched arm, and when they look back both Ben and his daemon are gone.

She asks Kelja about it later, the two of them waddling through long grasses on a hilltop, combing for porg eggs for their dinner.

Kelja clicks his beak. “I know we've been testing ourselves but...it still hurts after about twenty feet or so, doesn't it?” He tries again, launching into the sky and striving west towards the dying sun. The string pulls tight, and Kelja wheels back around before he's even crossed the small hilltop. They spend a moment catching their breaths, Rey's hand buried in his feathers, Kelja's head under her chin.

“We're normal,” Rey says. “We can finally go some distance from each other, you can _fly_ , but we're still just – there are still natural rules that bind us, aren't there? And Kylo, and Kylo's daemon...”

Kelja jumps down to re-commence burrowing in the grasses. “She has a name, you know. Castessa.”

“How do you know that?”

Kelja conspicuously avoids the question. “You know, I didn't hurt, when we did it earlier. Much the opposite.”

“What do you mean,” Rey pauses to reach into a small hollow that shows the telltale signs of nesting. She pockets five small yellow eggs as the mother porg watches from a distance. “the opposite?”

“You know what I mean.”

Rey twists her lips against her teeth, trying not to frown. “I don't know. No, I really don’t.”

Kelja hops out of the grass and onto Rey's foot. “Yes, you do. It's like...it's like finding that one engine part after searching all day through an empty Destroyer. It’s like filling a hole and smoothing out the sand.”

Rey shakes her ankle until Kelja flies off. She's...angry at him, inexplicably. He lands in his favourite spot on her shoulder, the place he perched for ten years before he finally learned to fly.

“It didn't hurt,” he says. “It didn't hurt...because, though I wasn't near to you, not at all, I was close to _him_.”

Rey stands up quickly. “He's a monster. And I’m going to kill him,” she says, pointedly not meeting Kelja’s eagle eyes.

“Oh, I don't think you will.”

“And what do you know?”

“Same as you. I just see it more clearly, I think.”

“You think?” Rey's never been so angry at Kelja before. She hates it—he’s been her only family for years, she hates this feeling but can't stop the heat that bubbles in her throat. “You don't. You don't think any more or differently than I do.”

She turns and walks quickly down the hill, leaving Kelja in her wake. He lags behind, and it hurts every step of the way, but neither of them say another word about it.

~

Japhanax still hasn't spoken today, but Rose doesn't mention it. Neither does her daemon, a great blonde lioness named Aiya with cool eyes and a soft smile. She makes Finn nervous. Big cats are more common in the First Order than the Resistance, but Aiya plods along with her head high and maintains a playful yet calm demeanour. She talks amiably to Japhanax, even though Japhanax doesn't talk back.

He wishes Poe were here, to reassure him, perhaps to do that _thing_ he did with Japhanax, almost touching but not quite. Thinking back, it's almost embarrassing how he'd practically fallen into Poe's arms, and then how close Poe had come to the taboo act of touching another's daemon. But it had soothed Japhanax. Finn, too, he’ll admit.

Finn wishes Linus was here too, of course, to comfort Japhanax—as the first daemon who Japhanax spoke to in years. There's something in that. There's something monumental in that, but Finn's worried it's only he who feels it. He reminds himself of the task at hand. Finding the codebreaker. Infiltrating the Supremacy. Securing the Resistance's escape. Getting Rey home safe. Poe is not essential to that, and neither is Japhanax's speech.

Rose pushes Finn, but Aiya doesn't push Japhanax. It's curious. And while Rose gets on Finn's nerves at first, she never asks him about his quiet daemon. On the ship to Canto Bight, the silence gets so long and heavy that Finn has to break it.

“They pacify your daemon,” he says into the back of Rose's head. “In Stormtrooper training. Daemons aren't allowed to talk.”

Rose pauses, then comments, “They want animals, not souls.”

Finn thinks it's not quite the time to be profound about it. “I just don't want it to make you uncomfortable. That she doesn't talk. At the moment, I mean. She usually does, but some days...” He opens his collar to see Japhanax nestled inside his jacket. “She'll be fine tomorrow, is what I mean.” He can only hope.

Rose seems to sense his insecurity. “Words aren't the only way to communicate. Especially with a daemon. You rely on them too much.”

Finn thinks of Poe’s wordless gesture, running his handing over Japhanax's head and down her body, just above her fur.

“Maybe,” he says.

~

Ben's never had a little brother, but he imagines that the Force is acting much like a little brother would. It barrels into his mind without warning, while he's _changing_ —Ben's not sure anyone's seen his bare skin for years. Anyone but Castessa. And now—

“Do you have something, a cowl or something you could put on?”

It feels oddly appropriate, now that he thinks about it. Rey's seen much more of him than his bare chest. She’s seen so much deeper. He can see in her eyes, though, and feel in her voice—she's blocking it out. _That’s the thing_ , Ben thinks, _the only thing that could hurt more than the pain of becoming, the pain of being finally whole: when the person who holds his missing piece pretends that there’s nothing there all._

Castessa bristles by his side in her panther form, and she's _angry_. _He's_ angry. It's the anger that says it: “Your parents threw you away like garbage.” But then his eyes focus in the night-darkness and she's crying. She's crying and his anger washes away like the tide; those tears might as well be his own and it feels like relief and release.

So of course he warns her about Luke. He's talked to Castessa about this, about her—it's almost all they've spoken about since Starkiller Base. That rage in Rey, that darkness he can feel bearing down on the flimsy walls she's put up. If he does nothing, she'll meet the same fate as he did.

She tries so hard not to believe him, and that hurts too. Most things do, these days. Rey's daemon, perched on her shoulder, caws and beats his wings. The air ruffles Castessa's fur and she shivers. The wholeness aches. Castessa recoils against the urge to get closer to Kelja and only barely holds it in check.

_If only he could touch—_

Then perhaps it might not hurt.

~

It plays in Rey’s mind like a dream. One of those dreams it seems will never end—where you wake only to be thrown out into that same dream again, again, again. The darkness, the hole, the cave, the mirror. The answers, just at her fingertips...and nothing. Only her, only her and the darkness that comes from within.

A nightmare. And she hasn't woken up yet.

Ben has said very little since she came back from the cave. Kelja perches on a rock and stares into the eyes of Kylo’s daemon – Castessa – who, as a panther, sits ramrod-straight, eyes narrowed back at Kelja like he is both her predator and her prey. They are only inches apart.

Rey can’t tear her gaze from Ben. There is nothing of the panther in his eyes.

“You’re not alone,” he says, the first time he's spoken in a while.

And she's not. Rey looks at Kelja and Castessa, thinks about the hollowness she can no longer feel. The missing thing that now seems found. “Neither are you.”

They each reach out at the same moment. It's slow, so slow Rey doesn't realise she's moved until her fingers brush Kelja's feathers. She feels so much of Ben—his loneliness, his horror, his hurt, and it feels _just like hers_. She feels him rippling out to her through the Force, across light years of space, but she needs to feel it under her hands, in her skin.

She knows what they're about to do. It feels like too soon and not enough, too much and too late.

She's looking at Ben, not at her hand, and the tips of her fingers meet Castessa's fur sooner than she expects. And—

—she feels him, all of him, all of them, all this way across the galaxy. She's never touched another person's daemon (of course she hasn't) but this isn't what she imagines it would feel like. It should feel wrong, and sick, or at least novel or strange. It doesn't—it feels like that fur is Kelja's, like the heartbeat echoing in her fingers is not Castessa's but that of her own daemon.

They don't speak, but Rey knows Ben feels it too.

~

Ben lunges out with the Force, tearing and pulling with desperate violence. The lightsaber hangs between them—and it really does hang, pulled by two equal yet opposing forces, a state of perfect physical suspension. Ben flicks his eyes from the saber to Rey and back again, back again. Kelja clutches Rey's left shoulder, his wings spread to grant Rey additional leverage and balance.

Castessa, however, is of no help. She’s flapping around his head, cycling through bird forms he's never seen her take before—owl, robin, seagull, wren. Ben thinks about Rey's hands in Castessa's panther-fur, and Kelja’s feathers under his own skin. He thinks about oneness, and sameness, and wholeness...but he concentrates on the pain of it, and not on the relief.

They fall apart. That perfect suspension breaks down. Ben welcomes the black.

~

It's Japhanax and Rose who save him.

The maw of the great cannon stretches before him, like it might swallow him whole; Finn hopes it does. Finn hopes it swallows him and he can tear it down from the inside.

But then Japhanax says—Japahanax _says_ —"No! Finn, stop!”

And he's so shocked he can only blink at her, with the engines still full throttle and thrusting them right into that fiery maw. Then he’s hit with giddy relief—she's _back_ , she’s fine, she’ll talk again—but it lasts only a second before Finn's world shatters in sparks and pain and screeching metal.

 _Rose_.

He pushes through the cuts and bruises and wounded pride and finds Rose, curled in the wreckage, leaning against the heaving chest of her lioness-daemon. He's careful not to touch her daemon as he bundles Rose up and out of the pile of twisted metal.

“Why would you do that?” Finn hates the anger in his voice but—why? He could have destroyed the cannon, could have destroyed the _entire First Order_ with the energy pulse overload of his collision.

He has to press closer to hear Rose's faint reply, “That's how we're gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.”

Finn thinks about that for a long time. He’s still thinking about it when they're racing through the crystal caverns, when Rey finds them and she's blessedly alive, when he's tucking Rose in to rest on the Milennium Falcon, and then finally—finally when Poe finds him holed up in the gunner seat, the only quiet spot he could find.

“You good?” He slaps Finn on the shoulder, a little too roughly but Finn isn't complaining. Poe seems to notice, though, and smooths his hand until it's just lightly resting there in the crook of Finn's collarbone.

Finn wonders again if Poe is just...like this, or if he _means_ it—and if he means it, what on earth it means. He injects a casual tone into his voice, replying, “Yeah, I'm good. You good?”

“Yeah. Japhanax good?”

They each look at where their daemons are conversing in low tones at their feet. “Yeah,” Finn says. “Much better.”

Poe kneels down beside the gunner seat, and his hand drops from Finn's shoulder to resting lightly against his thigh. _Seriously_?

“She ever has a bad day like that again,” Poe says, “you come find me and Linus, alright?”

“Alright,” Finn says, a little breathless, because Poe's doing it again—dangling his fingers just above Japhanax's fur, stroking the air above her back with the curve of a pinkie finger.

Finn looks at the top of Poe's head, and holds his breath, and thinks he might understand what Rose really meant.

~

There's a quiet moment in Ben's quarters, after it's all over.

He almost reaches out to Rey; it's become like instinct, involuntary as breathing. He just barely catches himself, and settles for talking to Castessa instead. She feels like all that Ben has left of Rey, and all that's left of himself. She hops onto his arm, transforming from a cat into a falcon. Clearly she’s sharing similar thoughts to Ben—this form reminds him of Kelja, though she's smaller and her feathers are a mottled snow-white.

“It’s all over, isn't it,” he says.

Castessa shuffles along his arm, ruffles her wings. “Perhaps.”

The weight of the day's events expels from Ben's mouth in a great sigh. He lies back upon his sleeping mat, leaving Castessa to perch on his bended knees.

It sure feels like it's over. _He ended it_. And, sure, he's mad that Rey couldn't see the glory of what they could become if they left these old regimes behind, with their restrictive titles and cramped bloodlines and antiquated legacies. But a small voice also asks—what if it’s _him_ who's wrong?

Ben's used to insecurity. He's used to spending hours staring up at dark ceilings and questioning, worrying until the dawn. He thinks he's never been sure of anything in his life. Except—maybe her.

Rey clings to certainty and stability like it gave her life—and perhaps it did, in her days upon Jakku's harsh deserts. She has this fire in her eyes that Ben knows he can never change and certainly never douse.

But she's gone. This thing they shared—chosen by the Force—Ben may as well have broken it with his own oversized fists.

“I miss him,” Castessa says. “It feels like...like it did before. The emptiness.”

Ben closes his eyes and imagines it's Kelja's claws digging into his skin, and Rey's breath filling his lungs. Dawn seeps in slowly as the night recedes. He doesn't sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the same-gender daemon thing means something but im not entirely sure what and that's how phillip pullman would want it


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well. it's been a while
> 
> this has been sitting on my computer since...before covid, lmao. that sweet and innocent time. i really just needed to proofread it and hit OK and sure that took four months but it is here now and i am rather proud of how this whole thing has turned out. 
> 
> i know this is the ep 9 chapter and that may scare some of you but it will be okay (i promise) ((you will see!))
> 
> please enjoy this last chapter and your morning/afternoon/evening and...thank you for reading :)

Ben dreams.

It’s a heavy dream, dull and viscous as tar. But on occasion a red heat builds and pools in the still of his chest, before fading back into the fabric of fantasy.

He takes a deep breath. He smells sand and sweat and sun. He’s barefoot, his toes sinking in sand, and the rest of him is clad in loose white cloth. Pale-yellow desert stretches as far as he can see, dunes undulating into infinity.

Its vastness should intimidate him, its emptiness should frighten him. It doesn’t. It feels – peaceful. Calm and impossibly safe.

Castessa is beside him, but he can’t quite look at her. His eyes skate across her like they’re not quite ready to see her shape. Her voice is the same, though.

“You should sit,” she says.

He does, sinking to the soft sand. He feels like a boy again, cross-legged on the ground at the Jedi temple. He remembers being young – not free, never free, but at least he was young once. He remembers being still, which confuses him. He has never been still.

That stillness holds him now, though. Waiting. Watching the dunes. He’ll forget this when he wakes.

~

A year passes, a month, a day; not one slips past without Ben replaying his last moments with Rey.

They might be burned into his mind, now. _You come from nothing_ , sunk into his skull. _You’re nothing_ , etched into the backs of his eyes. The words don’t sound like his own, but they are. And he must own them, he must claim them.

Because she _is_ nothing to this universe. She’s nothing to this world that spins and turns around the rise and fall of Skywalkers, that teeters upon hinges drilled into the backs of chosen children.

She’s nothing, and it’s _everything_ , but he should have known better. He should have known _her_ better. He underestimated how difficult it would be to break out of the old patterns –find the weakness, twist the knife, salt the wound. Snoke taught Ben manipulation well before he learned to wield a lightsaber, and about the same time his mother taught him manners.

But wasn’t that his point? _Break the pattern. Break the cycle._ The problem is – Rey decided that cycle was her home. That the pattern was her family. Rey chose. A niggling but familiar thought rises to the surface: _can Rey really choose wrong?_

Of course she can. And she did. Ben doesn’t delude himself – he chose wrong, too, and he continues to choose wrong every time he wakes in the morning and goes to sleep at night and doesn’t burn the First Order to the ground at any time in between.

He thinks about this one evening as he settles in his chambers. He could have crashed that TIE. He could have stabbed Hux in the back. He could have blown up this entire fleet and let the flames embrace him. But he didn’t, and he won’t, because –

_She’s here._

Ben fights the urge to run, he knows there’s no running from this. What he feared and longed for this past year – she’s _there_. He can see her, he can touch her – he thinks if he does touch her, he might enter her orbit irreversibly, he might disappear from this side of the universe and reappear in hers. And who knows what might happen then?

 _Rey_ , he thinks.

 _Ben_ , he hears.

But then Rey is there in sight, not just in mind, and her words are hateful. He doesn’t deserve to feel pain at that. Or, he deserves pain, but Rey doesn’t deserve to be the one who must inflict it. He can feel it from here – the rage she puts on, an ill-fitting mask. The hurt she deals out like cards.

He says, “You can’t hide, Rey,” but he thinks: _I wish you could._ He says, “I’m going to turn you to the dark side,” but he thinks: _I’m sorry._ He’s playing the same game as she is, and neither of them are very happy with their hand. No poker face.

When Rey disappears, Ben stands still for a minute. He considers his earlier idea: stab Hux, commandeer a ship, blow the fleet to smithereens. Instead, he lies down and tries to sleep.

He forced Rey to confront her past, and that should have been liberating. It’s one of his many mistakes; instead of freeing her, that revelation’s torn her up inside. There’s a hollow in Rey that’s had a year to dig itself deeper, deeper, deeper. 

Ben stares at the black and worries himself to sleep.

~

Finn dreams.

It’s a new dream, young and fresh as air. But on occasion an ancient undercurrent stirs the depths of his subconscious, ruffles his hair.

He takes a deep breath. He smells wind and water and winter chill. Waves lap playfully at his ankles. There is no beach or lake-bed as far as he can see—just water, a few inches deep, rippling into infinity.

It strikes him that he should be worried about Japhanax. She's not on his shoulder or in his pocket—and although the water is shallow, she's never been able to swim. But he's…not worried. She's here, somewhere. He need not worry.

He kicks his feet because he can, watches water spray in white arcs. But he lets the water still again, an endless shining mirror, and feels peace. This reminds him of another time – a very different time, with fire and bodies and blaster bolts screaming around him. So completely opposite to this still place but for the feel of that openness in his chest that once prompted him to lower his blaster, take off his helmet, and choose to be someone new.

That openness holds him still, now. Waiting. Watching the water. He’ll forget this when he wakes.

~

Meeting Jannah is…odd.

It’s _good_ , of course. He’s _grateful_ , downright amazed at the opportunity to share the experience of desertion with another human being. But it’s also odd, because he spent this last year thinking he was uniquely damaged. He’s spent this last year coming to terms with the past he still wants to run from and the future he’s learning to run towards.

Many of those in the resistance have similar experiences, sure. Poe is probably an outlier, with his golden-boy, rebel-child upbringing. Rose says he was born with in a B-Wing cockpit, which is probably a lie but Finn’s never been quite brave enough to ask. Talking about these things with Poe is…difficult. Poe’s spent his whole life running _to_ things – to battles, to command, and, Finn thinks sometimes, to Finn himself – but to run _from_ is something he’s never known.

“I don’t get it,” Poe said to him once. “What’s wrong with –“ he gestured at his mouth, embarrassed – “Japhanax’s speech.”

They were preparing a couple of X-Wings for a scouting mission, set to lift off at dawn tomorrow. It was already past midnight – it’s so easy to while the hours away with Poe. Finn finished one task, stopped to chat to Poe, and then he blinked and suddenly all the light had fled from the sky.

Poe crouched under the belly of his black-and-orange X-Wing, couldn’t see Finn, but Finn shrughed anyway. “To be honest, I don’t know either,” he said, trying to keep his voice breezy. Japhanax still and silent on his shoulder.

Poe continued, “I don’t want to be rude, or intrusive, or whatever. But I’m here if you want to talk about it. I can try to understand it.”

It’s painful to admit, but in that moment Finn didn’t think he _could_ understand at all. He shrugged again. Linus, hopping along at Poe’s feet, cocked his head at Japhanax.

“We can try,” Linus said. Japhanax said nothing.

Thinking back, Finn doesn’t know about this, anymore. Doesn’t think so. Not since Jannah came along with her tabby cat-daemon who never speaks at all. Not since Jannah instantly understood him, and he her, and their daemons looked at each other in silence. Compared to Jannah, Poe is so much harder.

Some time after that night with Poe and the X-Wings, just after they’ve met Jannah, just after Finn couldn’t stop himself from letting his anger fly at Poe for what might be the first time – Finn sits in the crashed Falcon and sighs. Japhanax mutters, “They can try.”

It’s the first thing she’s said all day.

~

Rey dreams.

It’s a violent dream, red and black as blood. But on occasion a quiet touch stills the heat in her chest, before being whisked away in a spinning web of subconscious.

She takes a deep breath. She smells iron and incense and iodine sea. The next thing she notices is – nothing. There is nothing but the metallic stench in her nostrils. She can’t feel a surface beneath her feet, or the air moving against her skin. There is only emptiness, a gaping black that stretches off into infinity.

She feels alone. She feels like nothing.

“Hold on,” Kelja says. “Wait for it.” His claws around her shoulder are a sharp comfort.

It turns out that Kelja’s onto something. A shape drifts into focus in the endless dark – something small, white, a kind of animal, possibly feathered. Rey breathes out.

She’s never wanted anything more than this, really, this feeling that washes over her as she realises she’s not entirely alone in the void.

There’s still empty blank beyond, but it’s that feeling of being…wanted _, needed_ – held, as if loved – that keeps her still, now. Waiting. Watching the dark. She’ll forget this when he wakes.

~

Rey’s going to kill him.

She says it once, and then again. And then again, she finds herself repeating: _I’m going to kill him_. She lets her limbs slip into a stance which echoes the shape of those words: _I’m going to kill him_. She pulls her muscles tight, tense and pulsing with the cadence of the chant: _I’m going to kill him_.

So, she strikes. He dodges – graceful. Her technique has improved a hundredfold since last they met at crossed blades, but most of that simply dissolves with the sea spray as her anger takes hold. She strikes again, misses, curses herself. She should have landed that hit. She’s better than this. 

When he finally blocks, it surprises her. He’s maddeningly casual about it, swinging his blade in the same manner as he might bat a fly. But though his muscles are loose, Rey sees the tightness around his eyes, high in his chest. She presses on.

Blow after blow, exhaustion sets in rapidly. She goes for a low stroke at Kylo’s feet but her arm spasms and she overshoots, loses her balance – why is she so tired, already? There’s no fire in her lungs, no energy in her limbs. It’s like the Force is a weight, dragging her down to the floor, to the sea, instead of propelling her forth as it should do.

Kylo doesn’t seem to suffer the same difficulties – he’s not exhausted, not energised either, it’s like he needn’t exert himself at all. He’s not even trying. He lets opening after opening pass, choosing not to strike when he very well could.

It makes Rey think – and she tries to stuff it away, but the thought spears through her exhaustion and her focus – maybe she _can’t_ kill him. Maybe she’s not…not fit to do so, maybe she doesn’t have his strength, and maybe she _never_ will. He’s a Skywalker, like Luke, like Leia. Who is she to be here, in the ruins of the Death Star, angling her blade toward Ben Solo’s heart?

When Kylo finally strikes back, it’s a shock. Castessa starts to snarl and pounce at Kelja as he circles the fight – and that, that isn’t just a shock, that feels _wrong_. Castessa bats at Kelja’s wing and tears out a feather. Kelja punctures Castessa’s panther-hide with his sharp beak. Rey wants him to stop, wants herself to stop but, she can’t, she won’t, _she’s going to kill Kylo Ren_. She draws back for a wild stab and –

_Leia?_

It’s like all the breath’s been yanked from her lungs, but she’s already lunging, catching Kylo’s dropped saber and plunging the blade right through Ben’s chest.

His flesh sizzles and burns in her nostrils before she pulls back the blade. The hole is deep, in muscle, organ and artery. Raising her eyes from that black hole – _she did that_ – takes herculean effort, but she meets Ben’s gaze as he falls.

He looks at Rey and her anger recedes, like the waves in the ebb of their ferocity. It almost feels like she’s accomplished her task – like she’s killed Kylo Ren. But – the man in front of her, the dying man, it’s _Ben_.

She doesn’t know what to do, but she does something. They take wing: Kelja moves like wind across water, and Rey like water on the wind. Each comes to land on Castessa and Ben, respectively, where they lie side by side with chests heaving and eyes trained upon their counterpart. Their _Other_.

One hand hovers above Ben’s chest, and the other out to Castessa in her panther-shape. Rey feels Leia lingering in the air, somewhere in the salt and the spray and the molecules in between.

Ben breathes out. Rey breathes out, and she reaches out to touch, to hold – to heal.

~

The settling of Ben’s daemon happens like he imagines one might fall in love: he doesn’t realise it’s happened until it hurts.

It starts with a perfect prism of energy – the Force flowing from Kelja, to Rey, to Ben, to Castessa. The current swirls and culminates in the closing of the awful wound in Ben’s chest, as they breathe in and out, and then – unexpectedly – it doesn’t stop there. Castessa starts to shrink, bucks and warps under Rey’s palm. She snatches her hand back, but Castessa keeps changing – from black to grey to white and back again, feathers and fur blurring in a frightening mass.

He’s healing – she’s settling – they’re _becoming_ – and it’s more painful than a saber through his stomach.

He meets Rey’s eyes but she looks away, turns away, steps back, and then keeps running. Ben doesn’t blame her. He’d run too – he’s run from this his whole life.

Somehow, he doesn’t feel like running now.

Ben stands, eventually, looking to the spot where Rey disappeared into the sea mist and then out at the thrashing waves – mirroring the tumult that is his own soul, his own Castessa. She’s a blur of howls and feathers and claws. Ben waits.

Then – his breath hitches as a pang grows in his chest. For an instant he thinks Rey’s healing didn’t work, was only temporary, but the wound hasn’t returned. So he looks, tears his eyes away from the pull of the water – so deep, so dark, he could throw himself to it but he wants to see. Needs to know.

He turns and he looks and there is Castessa, perched in perfect balance and craning her long neck to look back at him. Her wings are stretched and aflutter, looking like she might take to the sky with the slightest urging, to dive and soar and dance on the waves, and not to bury herself in them.

Ben reaches a hand out to her, and she flits up to rest at the crook of his elbow. Ben and Castessa make several monumental yet silent decisions in a single second before Ben turns and runs across the waves. Castessa glides ahead of him, at home upon the wind in the form of a great white swan.

~

They’re preparing for war – the last war, because that’s all they have left in them – when Japhanax turns to Finn and says, “I think we’re Force sensitive.”

Finn says, “Not now.”

It’s been going so well, almost too well. He feels at home in the resistance, he has a place – and not a place that was set for him, but one that he chose. He has Rey, and Rose, and Poe – yeah, it’s _definitely_ been going too well with Poe. After their earlier argument, this easy rhythm they’ve settled into together – _co-generals_ – feels like it might slip from Finn’s fingers at any moment.

“I feel…stronger,” Japhanax says. “Weaker, too, but just – different.”

Finn sighs. “Yeah. I know. But just—not now. Not while...” He trails off, gaze falling – magnetised – across the camp to where Poe stands in Leia’s place, head high, pep-talking a squad of pilots. He’s a picture of ease. But then Poe seems to feel Finn’s gaze on him – he looks over and smiles. Not a general, anymore, not even a rebel – just a man.

Finn finishes his thought with a sigh: “Not while it's going so well.”

~

Palpatine is a shell, and Rey knows it. There is nothing deeper than his gnarled skin, nothing beating beneath his black robes. There’s no snake-daemon twisted round his neck or hidden up his sleeve – not anymore. The power in him is shallow and faded. But he speaks to another darkness, one that Rey knows from the cave on Ahch-To, from Snoke’s throne room, and from her dreams.

Palpatine has nought more than words, but those words strike like blows.

 _Young scavenger…_ Palpatine’s sneer echoes around the vast chamber. _You have no place in this story_.

Rey clenches every muscle she can clench, to stop them from trembling. She should do something – speak, or act. She’s made it this far, hasn’t she? Doesn’t that give her the right?

 _The Resistance are fools to send you_ , Palpatine snarls. _And I thought Vader’s progeny had at least a lick of intelligence._ You _, bloodless, no inheritance to speak of. Merely a blip in the Force._

Luke’s saber is hot beneath her hands. She raises it – he’s powerless, he’s a relic, he’s _nothing_. She can do this. She can do this.

Palpatine laughs.

 _Strike me down in anger, girl, and I will always be with you_ , he says, his eyes gleaming like an animal’s – a hungry animal, starved and drooling at the sight of a fresh meal. _With you I will cleanse the last of the Skywalker blood from this galaxy._

Is it true? If she kills him, will he take hold of her, take her power? She doesn’t know. What kind of Jedi is she, really, if she doesn’t even know that? She’s not driven by vengeance, or legacy, not by ties to power or blood. She came here to end Palpatine only because she thought it was right.

Is that enough?

But then her jumbled thoughts crash back down to earth because, oh, it’s _–_

_It’s –_

_Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben_ , says her mind; _Castessa, Castessa, Castessa, Castessa_ , says Kelja.

Rey draws back the saber, renewed – she is fighting _for something_ , she just remembered, oh what timing – and readies her lethal strike. Palpatine laughs, eyes glinting yellow. Rey’s fingers brush Ben’s palm for the briefest instant, and she lets go.

Ben grasps Luke’s saber, Leia’s saber flies into Rey’s hand, and they erupt. It feels like they’re side by side again, back to back. Ben’s strength drives Rey’s own stab through the heart of one of Palpatine’s guards, and in turn she lends him her agility as he takes a flying leap. Kelja shrieks and caws, and in the back of Rey’s mind – as she dodges and weaves and strikes – she realises that something is different.

Castessa soars out of the dank shadow just ahead of Ben, and she is both strength and grace, both doom and salvation. She is a swan, a being of water and air – Rey’s not sure how she knows this. There were no waterbird-daemons on Jakku.

Rey cuts down the last guard and Ben falls into step with her like he was always meant to be there. He’s smiling at her – not with his teeth, but with the curled lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

 _Step aside_ , Palpatine screeches, _while I destroy the last Skywalker_!

Rey had nearly forgotten he was there, honest to the Force. She can feel the balance of things more keenly than ever – and Palpatine is nothing to it. Rey, though, she is _central._ She is the hinge.

They turn together, Castessa echoing Kelja’s resounding screech. 

~

Ben opens his eyes immediately before he feels Rey die.

He considers closing his eyes again. All he can see is black, anyway – there’s no light in this deep pit. Why open his eyes if there’s nothing to see?

But he opens them anyway.

The climb is gruelling. His leg is, surely, broken, but he puts weight on it anyway and bites his cheek to silence groans of pain. Blood wells in his mouth and drips onto his hands – he loses his grip, once, and falls ten feet.

He falls twice more before he finally reaches the mouth of the pit. Willing his sweat- and blood-soaked fingers to cling on, he cranes his neck above the edge and finally glimpses Rey – lying limp – dead – curled in the dust. Castessa is perched upon her shoulder, and it’s such deep relief to know that Rey wasn’t alone. He realises that he’d still, stupidly, expected to see Kelja. Of course, he’s dissipated. That great hawk lies as dust on the cold ground.

Ben hauls himself over the edge with a scream through gritted teeth. The hollow in his chest grows louder, burrows deeper with every agonising lurch forward. He’s metres away from Rey – he forces himself to look at her body every step of the way – when he falls upon his leg with an awful crunch. Castessa wakes him from brief unconsciousness with a lick to his face, and that’s when Ben realises that Castessa has changed shape. She settles back onto Rey’s unmoving shoulder, but not as a swan.

He looks Castessa in the eye. She looks back, shifting from panther to swan again. But she can’t hold it – transforms back into a panther, then to a terrier dog, then to a mantis, a flopping sting ray, a serpent. She’s bucking and warping now like she had when she’d settled for the first time. Before she’d become a swan and everything had felt right for the first time. _For such a short time._

Was that all they’ll ever get?

Well. It’s more than they deserve.

Ben reaches Rey at a crawl. Castessa slithers and climbs and flaps around them in a tornado of fur and feathers, and it feels like such loss. But it’s not about Ben. It’s never been about him.

He takes Rey in his arms because it’s all he can think to do. To touch her, here – in the same time, the same place, physically and not through the Force – is more than he could ever earn. It’s too bad she’s dead.

His throat feels like a pipe full of nails, his chest like a barrel full of wasps, his stomach like an echoing hollow. He looks up – realises he’s looking around for someone to help, a lost child in search of a parent. There’s no one. There’s nothing.

Alone.

He looks down again, though, as Castessa hops onto his knee. And she’s – she looks just like Kelja. She’s a hawk, with tawny feathers and sharp beak and those great wide wings. She holds the shape for a second and croaks, “You know what you have to do.”

And he does.

Castessa erupts into a myriad of shifting shapes again, but it doesn’t feel like loss now. There’s hope, potential, and Ben holds to that as he places his hand on Rey’s stomach, closes his eyes and breathes in – breathes out.

Unseen by him, his daemon settles for the second time. Unseen by him, Rey wakes.

“Kelja,” she says, first, looking at the bird at her shoulder. Not a hawk, though, and not a swan. Her eyes focus, she sits up and – “Ben.”

Ben smiles. Their daemon spreads their wings and takes flight above them – glorious wings spread like a thundercloud, long legs streamlined, black and white feathers and a blood-red crown.

Ben is pulled forward by Rey’s strong hand on the back of his neck. She kisses him like they’re sharing life, the one life, the same life, circulating through them and concentrated on the spot where Ben’s hand hovers lightly against Rey’s side, where Rey tugs at Ben’s hair, where their lips meet. 

Later, Ben asks Rey how it happened.

“I fell down a _pit_ ,” he says. “Castessa and I – we separated. We should both have died.”

Rey shrugs, unbalancing Keltessa, who flits from Rey’s shoulder to Ben’s. “Maybe Kelja was with you,” she says, and it makes no sense at all – have they ever?

~

Finn wakes up next to Poe these days and, each morning, he still can’t quite believe it. Nor can he fathom the touches they exchange, the words they give each other, the space they share. Sometimes Finn still gets a jolt when Linus brushes him with a wing, so casual it could be an accident but of course it never is.

He’s overwhelmed by how peaceful the days are.

Poe seems to miss the war, though. Finn can’t understand this, and it takes him a while to reconcile with that. Until another one of Japhanax’s silent days when he realises – love isn’t when you look at someone and understand every inch of them, immediately and utterly. Not necessarily. It’s pushing through, it’s striving for the next day when all will make sense again.

That’s the case for Finn and Poe, anyway. Love without (complete) understanding, but love anyway. Love despite.

As for understanding without love, well. Finn’s got that down, too. Kylo Ren becomes Ben Solo, and Finn will never be comfortable with how easy that transformation seems to be, in the end. It takes weeks for Finn to look at him, months for Finn to talk to him, and years for Finn to see him as something like a friend.

But Finn understands him immediately.

Sometimes he thinks, though, that some people _can_ have both. Love _and_ understanding. There’s something about Rey and Ben: the way they speak without speaking makes Finn think of all the nights he’s sat with Ben on the Falcon in deep silence. The way they touch makes Finn think of all the nights he’s spent with Poe, an intimacy that consumes him.

Finn doesn’t want whatever it is that Rey and Ben have – it’s too close, too tight. But he understands.

~

They dream.

It's a different dream, shared, and thick with the fog of three strong Force-users pressed into a tight dream-space. But it also feels as open and expansive as the universe, as infinity.

They take a deep breath and, hearing each other’s sharp intake of air, each of them realises that they are not alone.

There are no landmarks in this dream, no sights or sensations. Finn clutches Japhanax tight to his chest. Keltessa seems to be in two places at once – clutching Rey’s shoulders, or perched on Ben’s outstretched arm. A crane, a creature of both life and the divine. 

The Force holds them tight together. They wait for no one, and nothing, now. They are complete.


End file.
